Three wallets were able to inexplicably withdraw 800,000, 400,000, and 450,000 EGLD, worth a total of approximately $113 million at current pricing.
The Maiar Exchange, a decentralized exchange (DEX) based on the Elrond blockchain, has been taken offline temporarily after an attacker exploited a flaw and stole around $113 million in Elrond eGold (EGLD).
Beniamin Mincu, the co-founder and CEO of Elrond, tweeted minutes before 12:00 a.m. UTC on Monday that he and his team were “investigating a set of suspicious activities” on the Maiar decentralized cryptocurrency exchange.
The DEX was pulled offline shortly after, with Mincu announcing that the problem had been found and a “immediate patch” was in the works.
Mincu said a potentially critical bug was discovered that opened “an exploit area that we simply had to address and mitigate immediately” in a Twitter thread posted almost 24 hours later at around 11:00 p.m. UTC on Monday.
In a Twitter thread, pseudonymous on-chain analyst Foudres reported that the possible attacker used a smart contract to withdraw almost 1.65 million EGLD.
Three wallets were able to inexplicably withdraw 800,000, 400,000, and 450,000 EGLD, worth a total of approximately $113 million at current pricing.
The attackers were able to sell approximately 800,000 EGLD worth around $54 million, causing the price of EGLD on Maiar to drop from $76 to around $5. The remaining crypto is either retained in separate wallets, bridged to USD Coin (USDC) and Ether (ETH), or sold on centralized exchanges.
EGLD fell 9.5 percent from approximately $74 to a 24-hour low of $65.50, but has since recovered marginally and is now trading near $68.
He asserted that all assets are safe and will be available when the DEX reopens on Tuesday, claiming that the majority of funds that had been exploited had been recovered in full or will be paid by the Elrond Foundation.
As previously reported, roughly $1.6 billion in cryptocurrency was stolen from decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms in the first quarter of 2022, with compromised decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols such as DEXs accounting for over 90% of all stolen crypto.
